Analyzing UCPD Reports of Alcohol Infractions

We scraped data from the UCPD's incident report website.

NEWS

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FEATURE

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January 26, 2017

The Maroon scraped the University of Chicago Police Department (UCPD) website for the last six years of data on alcohol-related incident reports. We put together some graphs looking at when and where the UCPD has written up reports of infractions.

There have been 214 incident reports filed for alcohol-related reasons since O-Week 2010 (we collected data from September 18, 2010 to January 1, 2017). 84 percent of all incidents occurred between midnight and 4:00 a.m. The majority of incidents occur near dorms, and there’s a heavy concentration at and around Max Palevsky and Renee Granville-Grossman residence halls.

These UCPD incident reports predominantly include “Liquor Law Violations” or “Illegal Consumption by Minor.” Only reports that mention “alcohol” or “liquor” were analyzed. We couldn’t go back further than 2010 because data wasn’t available online.

Figure 1: Heatmap of Incidents

The map above displays the locations of all the incident reports filed by the UCPD. Dorms appear to be the busiest locations, with many incidents occurring at Max P and Granville-Grossman. There is also some activity north of campus, where many students live when they move off campus.

The graph above shows the total number of incidents by hour in the day. There are very few incident reports during the day; the vast majority of incidents, 94.8 percent, occur between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. The number of incidents peaks between 1 and 2 a.m.

This graph shows incident reports by day. However, to better capture the day an incident is aligned with, The Maroon defined a day to be from 6 a.m. to 6 a.m. in this graph. For example, the incidents displayed above for Saturday actually occurred between 6 a.m. Saturday to 6 a.m. Sunday. It’s worth noting that there were 212 percent more incident reports on Fridays and Saturdays than there were between Monday and Thursday.

Figure 4 shows the average number of incidents that occurred in individual weeks. For example, on average there were 1.47 incident reports filed during first week and 0.47 incident reports filed during second week. This means the UCPD is called, on average, two times in the first two weeks of a quarter.

Finals week is the least active week. Second, eight, and ninth weeks are also relatively inactive weeks. O-Week is roughly average in terms of number of incidents, but it’s important to remember that many students aren’t on campus during that week.

There are many more UCPD reports in October. The summer is the least active time period, likely due to students leaving campus. The dip in March and December could be due to finals or spring and winter break, respectively

Figure 6 shows that the number of incident reports is slowly increasing year to year. There were very few incident reports in 2011. This could be a result of the system not returning all the relevant data or from the UCPD not logging alcohol-related reports as much that year.

Figure 7 shows the average number of incidents per quarter. The UCPD is called, on average, roughly 11.5 times for alcohol-related violations in fall quarter but only about eight times in winter quarter.